1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to a method for boosting the downlink transmission to a mobile station, and more particularly, to a method for boosting the downlink transmission to a mobile station and a system utilizing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Among various communication topologies, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most common end-to-end data transmission protocol among computer hosts. The acronym TCP usually appears with Internet Protocol (IP) because TCP is widely deployed as a transport layer protocol over IP networks. TCP/IP supports error-free data transfers, in-order deliveries, congestion control and flow control. TCP/IP is suitable for data transmission over the Internet as it has excellent ability to restrain network congestion and guarantee traffic integrity. Thus, most Internet applications use TCP/IP, such as the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and World Wide Web (WWW) applications. TCP data transfer aims at providing an error-free channel over two endpoints, i.e. transmitting party and receiving party. Therefore, TCP is able to handle some problems that commonly occur in communication networks, such as packet loss, out-of-order routing and duplicated data. In addition, TCP also allows data recovery for damaged or lost data. Since two endpoints of a TCP session may have different processing capabilities due to different processors or buffer sizes, TCP also performs an end-to-end flow control to prevent the transmitting party from sending too much data to the receiving party. The flow control mechanism is achieved by using a sliding window. The TCP window size determines the amount of data flow. In addition, TCP also provides congestion control which dynamically adjusts the transmission rate based on the network conditions. The transmitting party may increase or decrease the window size based on network conditions. If the network condition is good enough, the window size is increased and vice versa. The most important indicator for network condition is the acknowledgement packet (ACK packet) that is replied by a receiving party. For a good network condition, the replies of the ACK packets are rapid. To boost the downlink bandwidth rate, a procedure is needed to reply ACK packets as earlier as possible.